Can I offer you a beautiful woman fleeing a castle in these trying times? From the cover of A Dangerous Observer alone, I knew this book was going to have everything I needed for a purely pleasurable escapist read. A Dangerous Observer is the latest Gothic Romance from one of my favorite authors, Amanda DeWees. (You may remember my reviews of her Gothic spin on Hamlet, Sea of Secrets, and her Daphne du Maurier Award–winning novel, With This Curse.) A Dangerous Observer came out just last month, so now is the perfect time to grab this fresh new read.
Alternating chapters in A Dangerous Observer tell the parallel stories of two female protagonists, Cecily and Eleanor. Cecily is a young debutante whose entrance into society is dampened by her bleak financial circumstances. Desperate to marry into stability, Cecily is thrilled when the handsome widower Connor Blake sweeps her off her feet. But when she arrives at his seaside estate, Sterne House, she feels the haunting presence of his first wife, Eleanor. Servants refuse to speak of her predecessor’s tragic death, objects seem to move on their own when her back is turned, and even the workers hired to improve the house find their progress hindered by a ghostly presence. But as Cecily digs deeper into this mystery, she realizes she may have more to fear from her husband than from any supernatural presence. Eleanor’s story picks up two years earlier. A young spinster with ambitions of becoming a nurse, Eleanor finds herself disarmed by her architect father’s charming apprentice, Connor Blake. After her father’s untimely death, Connor steps in to comfort and care for Eleanor. But what at first seems like a saving grace soon turns into a nightmare as Connor’s façade slips away and his true ambitions are revealed.
The book has very deliberate echoes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca—but don’t let that fool you into thinking you know where the story is going. Many of the Gothic tropes here are cleverly subverted, and the story veers off in a very different direction from du Maurier’s. Take for example, the housekeeper Mrs. Ansley. At first, she seems like a dour Mrs. Danvers-type character, the quintessential creepy housekeeper. But behind her reticence is a compassion and cleverness that both young women will need to rely on if they want to survive their time in Sterne House. And then, of course, there’s the First Wife trope: Is Eleanor a ghost? A malevolent presence (real or imagined) like Rebecca or Jane Eyre‘s Bertha Mason? Or is she an innocent victim like Cecily? Connor Blake’s machinations and multiple wives also put me in mind of Guillermo del Toro’s masterful film Crimson Peak, though A Dangerous Observer doesn’t have quite the same element of horror. And the constant shipwrecks and suggestion of malevolent wreckers and looters recalls one of Daphne du Maurier’s other works, Jamaica Inn. I appreciated the many nods to previous works and classic tropes that A Dangerous Observer worked in, while still being its own unique story.
But what I love most about neo-Gothic works like this one is their unapologetic feminist message. Eleanor’s and Cecily’s stories both show the dangers of a society in which women are entirely dependent on men. Eleanor is duped into a marriage with a practical stranger because she’s been led to believe that she needs a man to care for and protect her. But what she doesn’t fully realize until too late is that marriage means giving up her independence, autonomy, money, and property to the control of her husband. Cecily’s financial situation put her in an even more vulnerable position, and she is hardly given the luxury to consider whether the man she is marrying is the kind of person she wants to spend her life with. The social and economic realities for these women are far more terrifying than any ghost. But ultimately, the tale is an uplifting one. The women in A Dangerous Observer are able to eventually achieve a happy ending by building strong female friendships, forming new relationships based on mutual trust and respect, and learning to express and go after their own desires.
So, if you’re looking for your next quarantine read, I highly recommend checking out Amanda DeWees’s A Dangerous Observer. Independent bookstores could particularly use your help right now, so consider ordering a copy online using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. You can also purchase a digital copy from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Once you read it, be sure to let me know what you think in the comments!